Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Politics

It makes a lot of Americans insane that Wall Street execs are paying themselves gazillions in bonuses, even as they demolish their own firms and the financial system. They blame Wall Street for the financial crisis.

An Act For Establishing Certain Regulations For The Better Management Of The
Affairs Of The East India Company, As Well In India As In EuropeUS Banking System

Whereas the several powers and authorities granted by charters to the united
company of merchants in England trading to the East Indiesto banking companies have been found, by experience,
not to have sufficient force and efficacy to prevent various abuses which have prevailed
in the government and administration of the affairs of the said united company, as well at
home as in Indiaabroad, to the manifest injury of the public credit, and of the commercial
interests of the said company; and it is therefore become highly expedient that certain
further regulations, better adapted to their present circumstances and condition, should
be provided and established: ...

Etc. The message is clear: conservatives get scared more easily than liberals.

Right? That's what the titles say-- I'm not off base here, right? There's no other possible way to interpret them?

II.

The methodology is fine-- but the interpretation is so demonstrably flawed that they are actually interpreting the results backwards.

Here's the most important line of all-- found only in the SA article-- in the second to last paragraph, of course:

People who leaned more politically left didn't respond any differently
to those [scary] images than they did to pictures of a bowl of fruit, a rabbit
or a happy child.

Really? Spider on face vs. happy child? No difference?

That extra bit of info doesn't even appear in the Science News story-- or anywhere else, for that matter.

The graph shows that liberals and conservatives have a trivial skin response to neutral pictures, and liberals show no difference in response when confronted with a scary photo.

So the actual finding isn't that conservatives are fearful; it's that liberals seem not to exhibit much response to scary photos.III.

But it's actually a little worse than that.

The typical use for such tests of startle and fear aren't to see how scared people are, they are used specifically to find out how scared people aren't. For example, they are used to evaluate psychopathy, and the results are the same as here-- psychopaths have decreased responses, compared to normal people, to aversive photos.

So which is it? Are conservatives fearful, or are liberals psychopaths?

I'm not picking sides in the debate, but I am pointing out how this study missed the actual result-- liberals are less fearful than would be expected-- and then the study was publicized in the media with an entirely backwards inference, that conservatives scare easily.

But it sounds like science, conducted by scientists; it's published in Science, and then publicized in Scientific American. It must be true.

2. Oil prices were pushed higher (Iran/Israel tensions, etc) by a concerted government effort to generate oil revenues for Iraq, promote greater stability so as to allow partial withdrawal of troops before election; and a subsequent reduction of oil prices to erase them as a campaign issue. Both Iran and Israel were in on the plan.

There isn't really an easier way to say this: that cavalier,
simplistic attitude towards history; myopic beliefs which bypass logic
or reason, supported only by intuition and faith; and a hatred of
others who have a radically different perspective on humanity-- that's
not Bush, that's us. I'm not even saying this perspective doesn't have
some merit; but know thyself, yo.

Most of our enemies
share a common social philosophy that, at its core, is psychic: don't
trust any country where women are regularly more powerful than men;
where individuals are more important than a collective; and where
personal beliefs and freedoms trump historical identity. Because that
means that its men are weak, its individuals are selfish, and they
cannot be trusted to act in the long term interests of their own
people. Rather than responding seriously to worldview,
with equal fervor-- and it's so easy to do it-- the country has instead
chosen to release this press statement: "Bush lied."

It is, to me, the most important article I have ever written on this blog.